An estimated 15 million people died during the first two years of the COVID-19 epidemic, new figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) suggest. That is about 2.7 times the number officially reported to individual agencies. The difference is based on estimates of ‘extreme deaths’, which include deaths missed by national reporting systems.
The figures, released today, are the latest in a series of global epidemics, which say that epidemics and public health professionals are needed to monitor decisions and effectively plan future events. These critical data not only reflect the impact of the epidemic but also the need for all countries to invest in robust health systems that can sustain critical health services in times of crisis, including robust health information systems, “WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
WHO estimates total Mortality
The WHO estimates of total mortality are in line with previous studies. However, its numbers are already controversial. India has publicly opposed the organization’s excessive death rate there, and said the process was flawed.
The official death toll is lower than the death toll due to delays and incomplete reporting and lack of data in many countries. To fill in the blanks, mathematicians and data scientists look at the total mortality statistics and compare them with those of pre-epidemic years. Even this basic death data is not available in most countries, so global mortality rates rely on computer models to estimate COVID-19 deaths.
The WHO global mortality rate for 2020 and 2021 is 14.9 million (see ‘COVID’s true toll’). The majority of these deaths (84%) are located in Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas, and more than two-thirds (68%) occur in only ten countries.
Economist said on the data
The work of the WHO is very commendable, and I know that much effort has been put into it. To put it bluntly, they are confirming the actual death toll from the epidemic, ”said Sondre Solstad, who leads a modeling career in London’s Economist magazine to quantify the epidemic. The Economist estimates between 12.3 and 21.3 million deaths by 2020 and 2021. A third attempt, made by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, Washington, has put the death toll at between 17.1 million and 19.6 million. Models use different data sets and techniques, producing different results.
“This model is a live model, and this is the latest result, but we plan to update it with more and more international data, which will improve it,” said Ariel Karlinsky, an economist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel who worked on the WHO project.
“It is time for a global, regional, national and local credibility,” Karlinksy said. “It will help us to be more aware of other disasters and can also warn us of the coming catastrophe.”
Estimated COVID-19 deaths in India
India still clings to the death toll. The WHO estimates that the number of pandemics in the country by 2020 and 2021 was between 3.3 and 6.5 million – about ten times the number of COVID-19 deaths in India at 481,000 over the same period. India has shared the 2020 national data with the WHO only on May 4, and has been experimenting with statistics for months, a source involved in WHO work, but who wishes to remain anonymous due to political sensitivity, told Nature. “In fact they are trying to disrupt everything.”
In a public statement, the Indian Department of Health and Family Welfare said it was “concerned about the” standard “of standards and has been” in the normal and deep technical trade with the WHO on this matter “.
ShahidJameel, a veterinarian and former chairman of India’s COVID-19 genetics committee, says he trusts WHO’s standards more than government figures. “The number of ballparks produced by India so far, about 500,000, is very low. Those of us who have been there and those who have experienced it know that it is very low,” he said “And now there are courses to support that.”
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Hi, Its a wounderful post.Thanks for your nice post. Do you know? Excess mortality is calculated as the difference between the number of deaths that have occurred and the number that would be expected in the absence of the pandemic based on data from earlier years.